I am Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for the Heartland Institute, Senior Advisor for Entitlement Reform and Budget Policy at the National Tax Limitation Foundation, General Counsel for the American Civil Rights Union, and Senior Fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. I served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under President George H.W. Bush. I am a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of America's Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb (New York: Harper Collins, 2011).
I write about new, cutting edge ideas regarding public policy, particularly concerning economics.

Sorry Global Warming Alarmists, The Earth Is Cooling

Climate change itself is already in the process of definitively rebutting climate alarmists who think human use of fossil fuels is causing ultimately catastrophic global warming. That is because natural climate cycles have already turned from warming to cooling, global temperatures have already been declining for more than 10 years, and global temperatures will continue to decline for another two decades or more.

That is one of the most interesting conclusions to come out of the seventh International Climate Change Conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute, held last week in Chicago. I attended, and served as one of the speakers, talking about The Economic Implications of High Cost Energy.

The conference featured serious natural science, contrary to the self-interested political science you hear from government financed global warming alarmists seeking to justify widely expanded regulatory and taxation powers for government bodies, or government body wannabees, such as the United Nations. See for yourself, as the conference speeches are online.

What you will see are calm, dispassionate presentations by serious, pedigreed scientists discussing and explaining reams of data. In sharp contrast to these climate realists, the climate alarmists have long admitted that they cannot defend their theory that humans are causing catastrophic global warming in public debate. With the conference presentations online, let’s see if the alarmists really do have any response.

The Heartland Institute has effectively become the international headquarters of the climate realists, an analog to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has achieved that status through these international climate conferences, and the publication of its Climate Change Reconsidered volumes, produced in conjunction with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

Those Climate Change Reconsidered volumes are an equivalently thorough scientific rebuttal to the irregular Assessment Reports of the UN’s IPCC. You can ask any advocate of human caused catastrophic global warming what their response is to Climate Change Reconsidered. If they have none, they are not qualified to discuss the issue intelligently.

Check out the 20th century temperature record, and you will find that its up and down pattern does not follow the industrial revolution’s upward march of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), which is the supposed central culprit for man caused global warming (and has been much, much higher in the past). It follows instead the up and down pattern of naturally caused climate cycles.

For example, temperatures dropped steadily from the late 1940s to the late 1970s. The popular press was even talking about a coming ice age. Ice ages have cyclically occurred roughly every 10,000 years, with a new one actually due around now.

In the late 1970s, the natural cycles turned warm and temperatures rose until the late 1990s, a trend that political and economic interests have tried to milk mercilessly to their advantage. The incorruptible satellite measured global atmospheric temperatures show less warming during this period than the heavily manipulated land surface temperatures.

Central to these natural cycles is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). Every 25 to 30 years the oceans undergo a natural cycle where the colder water below churns to replace the warmer water at the surface, and that affects global temperatures by the fractions of a degree we have seen. The PDO was cold from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, and it was warm from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, similar to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).

In 2000, the UN’s IPCC predicted that global temperatures would rise by 1 degree Celsius by 2010. Was that based on climate science, or political science to scare the public into accepting costly anti-industrial regulations and taxes?

Don Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus of Geology at Western Washington University, knew the answer. He publicly predicted in 2000 that global temperatures would decline by 2010. He made that prediction because he knew the PDO had turned cold in 1999, something the political scientists at the UN’s IPCC did not know or did not think significant.

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“global temperatures have already been declining for more than 10 years, and global temperatures will continue to decline for another two decades or more.” Very interesting considering that Richard Muller has already changed sides and published an exhaustive report of his research with a very different conclusion. The world is warming plain and simple, how else can you argue the retreat of glaciers/ disappearance of them the world over and just look at Mt. Kilimanjaro if you need to see a picture of what has happened in the last couple of decades. I am very surprised to see that the “realist” failed to mention that the outlawing of CFCs having a hand in the supposed “decline” of global warming, a rare act of government intervention to preserve our blue marble. By the way CFC are more potent then CO2 when it comes to Green house gases. The published author you praise those have great points, but the effect of sunspots on our climate should give you more concern to treat Global Warming seriously. If we get the Maunder Minimum now, we are lucky, but what if we dont. What if we continue to recklessly manufacture and pollute the atmosphere with G.H. gasses and nothing happens because of the Maunder Minimum, and then after 200 years of unsustainable polluting, we get so many sunspot activity that the Midwest is turned into a mini Sahara? What would you say then Mr. Ferrara? The lives of your grand-children, and your progeny is at risk because people decided a $4 million profit was more beneficial than preserving our ecology.

Why then do climate change supporters ignore historical data that disprove them? Earlier last century people though we were going into an ice age due to global cooling with more CO2 output than we use now. There was periods of historical warming as well when there was very little CO2 output centuries ago. Cooling and warming trends happen over and over in history. Also if CO2 output is the problem why are volcanoes ignored which put out more of the dangerous gases than humanity combined at the moment, particularly during an eruption?

Scientists from the University of Washington and Austria’s University of Innsbruck studied 20 years of field work and comprehensive data regarding Mount Kilimanjaro. They made numerous findings that individually and collectively refute any notion that global warming has any meaningful connection to the recent retreat of Kilimanjaro’s alpine glacier.

co2 does not and will not trap heat.No hot spot in our atmosphere!The planet warms and it cools so when past temps were higher than today and co2 was lower then what you thin was the causal?Co2 has no correlation with temperature!People can go on all they want about co2 trapping heat but unfortunately, in their time, Tyndall and Arrhenius could not see the whole picture of the spectrum of a gas which is why they got stuck on seeing only the warming properties of a gas (i.e. the closed box experiments).The stupid 101 AlGore youtube vid of a bottle,100% co2(represent atmosphere) and a light bulb to represent the sun is bollocks.Earth is not a closed system!Fail!

joseph – We now have satellites that can measure energy coming into the earth’s atmosphere from the sun, and energy being radiated away. More energy is coming in than is leaving. Something is trapping the heat. But it’s been known for more than a century that CO2 is the key greenhouse gas. If it weren’t for CO2, earth would be too cold to support life as we know it.

BTW – What do you think is the significance of the “tropospheric hot spot?” The key CO2 global warming factoid is that the troposphere is getting warmer while the stratosphere is cooling, meaning that more energy is being trapped in the troposphere.

How do you respond to the fact the glaciers in Antarctica are have been increasing in size? Glaciers aren’t disappearing all over the world. Oh and CO2 levels increase after the climate has warmed, not before. CO2 levels are reactionary to climate, not the other way around.

Dallas Dunlap, You are misrepresenting the results of the satellite monitoring of atmospheric heat. The results you cite are what the results should be if human caused global warming was true, and you seem to think that is so because you are certain that man caused global warming is true. But the actual results are that the satellites find that the energy leaving is equivalent to the energy incoming. See Richard Lindzen, MIT. The signifigance of the tropospheric hotspot is that while the UN’s global warming models all show that there should be such a hot spot over the tropical latitudes, the satellites and weather balloons all show there is no such hot spot. That is one of the scientific proofs that the theory of man caused global warming is false. See Climate Change Reconsidered. The debate is actually over.

Lindzen’s claim has been comprehensively debunked (at RealClimate for example), as should be really be intuitively obvious from the fact that the oceans in the last 10 years have been gaining heat at twice the rate of the previous decade, and that global warming has been continuing unabated for over 30 years now. The tropical tropospheric hot spot issue is a really bizarre thing to bring up as ‘proof’ that the world isn’t warming, when we have abundant evidence from literally thousands of other physical and biological metrics which say the opposite. I’m sorry to say that this smacks of desperation and straw-clutching, rather than a rational argument.

Peter, you are overlooking a simple fact. The signature of global warming from increased greenhouse gasses is not the ‘hot spot’ but in fact is the cooling of the upper atmosphere and warming of the lower atmosphere. This has been observed and well documented. Nice try at diversion though.

Peter Ferrara, If this were facebook I would click ‘like’ on the article and ‘like’ on your comments. I think we as realists (or deniers as the left labels us) do not need to offer proof that AGW doesn’t exist. We can, and always *do*, but as reasonable people the burden for proof rests about the one making the claim about AGW. We, as realists, give the alarmists more than they deserve, by providing reasoned, factual, and scientific rebuttal. It obvious the alarmists don’t value reason; hence, their persistence with ad hominem attacks (“don’t you worry about your future offspring!?” etc). I think we need to stop rewarding their unreasonable behavior, by responding with logic and facts, and demand that the alarmists be reasonable, or we make it clear that we will refuse to deal with them by any other means. I think you have been more than charitable and kind to them by responding at all; let alone with factual rebuttal.